AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I was born an Ohioan, living near Columbus up through the 7th grade, then completed my pre-college years in Lansing, MI. I am a 1975 graduate of Michigan State University in Zoology with a minor in Entomology and worked for MSU's W.K. Kellogg Biological Reseach Station for four years as a research technician. I worked first for a botany professor then a microbiologist. It got boring counting seeds, roots and bacteria of aquatic insect guts but the drafting table in the hallway was my haven, creating charts, graphs and simple illustrations for technical journals as well as macro- and micro-photography. This whet my appetite to study biological illustration and graphic arts at The University of Florida (Gainesville) and to support my out-of-state tuition, lucked into a position illustration in tape-slide form the entire undergraduate entomology textbook on an NSF grant (before computers, which really dates me).

In 1980, I became a resident of Louisville, Kentucky, where I still live, branching out into other types of illustration and fine arts and in mid-life, my truest love in the Arts - literature. I am also an amateur musician on vocals and keyboard and was the lead instrumentalist on recorder (a wooden flute that was invented about the same era as the transverse metal flute) at a contemporary service in a Lutheran Church in Gainesville. I was the charter president of The Graphic & Scientific Illustrators' Association in Gainesville, program chair for many years of The Palette Club of Kentucky, Inc., a member in good standing of the national Kentucky Watercolor Society since 2000 and the largest organization for the visual arts in town, the Louisville Visual Arts Association, participating in their silent auction at their home base, The Watertower on the Ohio River. Louisville is colloquially called "The River City" and has reciprocal business rights with small towns across the bridge in Indiana called "Kentuckiana". You know us best as the home of The Kentucky Derby, Mohammed Ali, The Louisville Slugger baseball bats, Diane Sawyer and Olympian swimmer Mary T. Meagher. Abraham Lincoln was born about 45 miles south of Louisville near what is now Ft. Knox. Paddlewheel boats still exist and Southern culture and hospitality abounds. It is a beautiful city with a low cost of living.

I married W. Frank Lawson, a certified dental technician of 28 years, a crown and bridge specialist. We met in a small dental lab in west Louisville in the spring of 1994 and were married January 14, 1995. I thoroughly enjoy being a housewife where I can also free-lance at home. As we married later in life, we have no children, just intellegent sly independent cats, which Bob Sutherland is trying to abolish in lieu of the dumb obedient species of dogs. (Dachshunds are an exception.) Actually, my first choice as a college major was to become a DVM, so all species of animals are ok in my book....plants, like cherry trees, too. How very Spartan of me.

I have one brother in St. Louis and my parents are now Louisvillians as well. Frank was born and raised here, so I have to cook vegetables to death, learned to stomach okra, cornbread and grits and to love bluegrass music which comes in two forms - good or bad. A quizzical thing to get used to while I had a small business creating notecards and greeting cards, was that contracts are preferably done by a handshake and by bartering. A written contract still implies you are legally bound to the point of having the right to turn your customer in for the still in the back lot. It is literally true in some cases, but that is where it came from. Of, course, I had to learn the rules of basketball like the back of my hand to fit in with The UofL Cardinals here, UK just down the road and IU across the river. Few people can name over two universities in the Big Ten, let along find a game on TV.

We are very proud of our artisans in Kentucky and I now have a decal from The Kentucky Council For The Arts in Frankfort stating :
"I AM A KENTUCKY WRITER!". And I ain't spinnin' no yarn.

© 2007 Kathy Lawson
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in her Gallery!